Facebook’s much anticipated new search product, Graph Search, launched to a limited set of users this week with a mission to help users connect and discover. With a reported 1 billion people, 240 billion photos and 1 trillion connections to create uniquely Facebook search results from, is this Facebook’s play to win search dominance from Google? Not yet, at least.

Founder Mark Zuckerburg stressed in his announcement speech that “I think what you’ve seen today is a really different product from what’s out there.”

The difference is in the dataset. Traditional web search is designed to receive any textual input via the search box and convert that to search results. Google, Bing, and other traditional search engines use armies of crawlers to index as many pages of the Internet as possible. From that index of content, they apply their own algorithms to determine context, relevance and authority, and produce a set of search results.

Facebook’s new Graph Search is different in two important ways: Facebook doesn’t index the Internet, and search is based on controlled filters rather than open-ended search queries. In place of crawling, Facebook relies on its user base to create or discover content that they find interesting across the Internet and share it with their Facebook friends….

Read the article in full at Resource’s weThink blog for more on how Facebook search works and what it’s ramifications are for users »